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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8651146" data-attributes="member: 71235">It's related to all of them—or can be. Apocalypse World doesn't care about (1) & (2). Blades in the Dark very much cares about them and provides a robust system that accounts for them (although its "skills" are very broad in scope). The character in question wants some particular thing that has been established to be in the safe (part of the stakes), and they want to get into it by picking the lock (skill/task).But again, the stakes are not "papers found" vs. "papers not found". The stakes are, "I get the dirt" vs. "some complication arises". And that is not a binary but a pair in combination, in which the particular combination "I don't get the dirt but there's no complication" is deliberately excluded, because it's boring. So the outcomes are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Success without complication</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Success with complication</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Failure with complication</li> </ul>Even the first case is somewhat boring from a dramatic perspective, but it's nice to have things go your way every now and again. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /> You can add in degree of success or complication, as Blades does. "Not only do you find the Baron's incriminating documents, but you discover he's been blackmailing the Countess."And again, all such outcomes and facts could be mooted as part of the stakes ahead of time, or after the resolution of the dice roll, but even then in a game like Blades it's subject to some discussion and negotiation. That's part of the play style for these games.Not at all. See my earlier post about what the potential complications are. Picking the lock quietly might fail with a complication, or succeed with a complication, but that complication is much less likely to be alerting the guards and winding up in a chase or pitched battle. Then again, if the party is cool with making a huge racket and leaving obvious evidence of a break-in and maybe getting into a pitched battle, they can have the smasher do their thing.It's not just the motives & desires, it's the generation of a plausible fiction that everybody at the table is satisfied with (regardless of success or failure at individual dice rolls). The fiction has to take some form, but the binding from fictional form to game mechanics varies from game to game. Apocalypse World is way at the far end of generality. Blades in the Dark leans toward appearing more (process-)simulationist, but when you look at how it handles action resolution, that turns out not to be the case. Torchbearer has even more skills, but again, the way it handles them is cosmetically simulationist at best.</blockquote>

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